Gates Package — page 1072

The exercise didn't go off flawlessly--the organizers noticed a number of gaps in the process--but it would be surprising if it had been flawless. The point is that the gaps were identified and, most importantly, fixed. This full-scale exercise was relatively limited compared to the national and regional ones that the world needs, but it had many of the necessary components. If exercises like this one were run by more countries and in more regions, they would keep us from making a classic mistake: preparing for the last war. It will be tempting to assume that the next major pathogen will be as transmissible and as lethal as COVID, and as susceptible to innovations like mRNA vaccines. But what if it isn't? There is no biological reason why the next pathogen couldn't be far more lethal. It could quietly infect millions of people before a single person starts feeling sick. Our bodies might not be able to knock it out with neutralizing antibodies. With germ games, we'll be able to test against the wide range of pathogens and scenarios that the next outbreak might present. Since the risk of a pandemic is higher than the risk of an all-out war, we should be running an LSE-sized global exercise organized by the GERM team at least once a decade. Each region should run another major exercise in the same decade, with advice from GERM, and countries should undertake smaller simulations with their neighbors. Military exercises such as Thailand's Cobra Gold and the international RIMPAC have been going for decades, and they've likely improved regional responses to typhoons and tsunamis. There is one reason to hope that the reports generated by future exercises won't be ignored: experience. In the early days of COVID, many experts thought the countries that had gone through a previous coronavirus outbreak in 2003 were better prepared for COVID. Having experienced how bad it was, the theory went, they were ready--politically, socially, and